James Haydock – författare

The book dramatizes the plight of abolitionist Quakers living in eastern North Carolina during the Civil War. As the war rages from1861 to 1865, both Union and Confederate forces tramp through theregion to destroy whatever they come upon and confiscate, as thewar drags on, anything of value. A Quaker family entrenched in rural tradition and a faith emphasizing peace quietly resists the brutalityof war but is made to suffer. As Southerners, Union soldiers see themas the enemy. As abolitionists going against the grain of Southernculture, Confederate soldiers despise and harass them. When theyrefuse to pay the exemption tax, their men are required to go into thearmy. Refusing to bear arms, their mettle is severely tested at Gettysburgand Petersburg. The book is about courage and endurance in the maw of adversity. It is closely based on historical fact, Confederate records,and Quaker tradition.

Beacons River is a tale of ambition and human suffering in the mind and heart of a young man struggling for success as a novelist. Based on the life and career of nineteenth-century novelist George Gissing, the book is about a man wrestling with destiny as he dreams of making his mark in the world. Soon after his father dies, Andrew Beacon goes away to a Quaker boarding school with two younger brothers. An exemplary but lonely student, he wins a scholarship to a college known to be a stepping stone to Oxford or Cambridge. At eighteen, on the brink of realizing his dream, he meets a woman of the streets who changes the course of his life. After serving a month in prison, he leaves England to start over in America but returns a year later. Living in poverty with a drunken wife, he writes his first novels. When she dies at twenty-nine, he marries a woman whose violence drives him vixen-haunted from home. Badgered by loneliness and hardship but losing himself in his work, in time he finds the woman meant for him. The love they cherish before he dies completes the pattern of a life that runs like a tumultuous river from mountain to sea.

Speaking the deepest and truest thoughts of humankind in the language available only to the gifted, the Victorian poets elected to do more than merely sing as versifiers. By coming to grips with thorny contemporary issues and suggesting workable solutions, they struggled to lead their people out of the wilderness. Tennyson, who came to be known as the voice of Victorianism, is the poet most often credited with this ambition. But Matthew Arnold and the other major poets had a similar aim. Their poems, while not devoid of feeling, are charged with the main currents of social, scientific, religious, and philosophical thought. Interwoven and resonating in sensuous song is their own thought. The best of the poetry fits the word and thought to the troubling developments of the time and rises to a prophecy to predict the problems of our time.